Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Some interesting research being done. Can hardly wait for the results. I'm particularly interested in the first project. It is being done at my alma mater and I know some catalogers in that part of the state. Seen on the OCLC Web site.

OCLC Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) have awarded research grants to Shawne Miksa (North Texas); Jun Wang (Peking), in collaboration with Hong Xu (Pittsburgh); and Peiling Wang (Tennessee).

Shawne Miksa, Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas will conduct "A Survey of the Extent and Utilization of Cataloging Tools and Resources within Technical Services in the North Texas Public Libraries." This study will employ survey, interview, and focus group approaches to study the utilization of cataloging tools and resources in technical service departments of public libraries in the North Texas Regional library System.

Jun Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Management at Peking University and Hong Xu is Professor and Head of the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Principal Investigator Wang and Co-investigator Xu will study "The Mining of Cataloging Knowledge from Bibliographic Data for Automatic Subject Cataloging," in order to build a cataloging knowledge base (CKB) for automatic cataloging by incorporating the cataloging model into the structure of the thesaurus or classification scheme. Automatic cataloging is achieved by extracting subject-rich terms from new documents and querying them against the CKB to find the relevant subject headings and class numbers. This research is expected to facilitate bibliographic control of Web resources.

Peiling Wang is Associate Professor at The University of Tennessee's School of Information Sciences. Her project, "A Dual Approach to Web Query Mining: Towards Conceptual Representations of Information Needs," will combine quantitative and qualitative techniques in order to mine Web query corpora to generate structured representations of conceptual information needs. The expected results will form a basis for redesigning user-system interactions and better organizing Web information objects to meet users' needs.